The following is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and jazz pianist, organist, composer, and arranger Larry Goldings. His new album, I Will, featuring bassist Karl McComas-Reichl and drummer Christian Euman, was released 14 February via Sam First Records. Links to purchase the record, and to Golding’s website, can be found at the end of this article.
“Will I wait a lonely lifetime?” Paul McCartney trills in the famous 1968 Beatles ballad that gives I Will its name. Not that Larry Goldings has had to, as per his piano works – though Goldings has historically been far more represented on the Hammond B-3.
On piano, he’s appeared on 1997’s Awareness, with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Paul Motian; 2011’s solo-piano In My Room; 2014’s trio date Music from the Front Room; and 2024’s Big Foot, a collaboration with tap dancer Melinda Sullivan. In contrast, Goldings’ organ trio, with bassist Peter Bernstein and drummer Bill Stewart, has been consistently active for nearly 35 years.
He should, however, hardly be underestimated on the former instrument. “He can make a rhythm section sound like a big band,” the preeminent pianist Brad Mehldau recently said of Goldings. “We know he does that on organ, but he also can do it on the piano.”
I Will is further proof positive of this: James Taylor’s keyboardist for nearly a quarter century, Goldings brings a personal yet folkloric touch to these two originals (‘Roach’, ‘Sing Song’) and six covers.
The covers not only comprise ‘I Will’, but George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ and ‘Embraceable You’, Mario Bauzá’s ‘Mambo Inn’, Judee Sill’s ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker’, and Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Somewhere’. “I love great folk music – its simplicity and purity,” Goldings tells UK Jazz News, of the White Album tune. “It brings out the folky part of me.”
Another side of Goldings’ artistry is jazz-centric, social-media-friendly comedy; from the Target-wigged, Monk-adulterating Hans Groiner to his flailing CPAC pianist character, he’s a certified funnyman. In the full interview below, Goldings holds forth on all the above and more.
UK Jazz News: You’re primarily known as an organ player. How do you think about the organ versus the piano in your work?
Larry Goldings: I’m almost trying to catch up as a pianist in terms of finding my own sound. I spent so many more years as an organ player that I’ve carved out my own path [on that instrument] a little more.
With piano, I’ve been out there so much less that I’m still sort of figuring it out. But, I think, knowing me, I’ll always feel that way. I think repertoire is a big, big part of how one finds their path and their sound, and I naturally gravitate to a very eclectic interest in music.
Like me, Karl McComas-Reichl, the bass player in the trio, has a wide listening experience, including a lot of classical music. Sometimes, we’ll realise that we both love the same classical piece, and we’ll scribble out a basic chart of something from that repertoire and try to find something in that.
To me, it’s like the famous Duke Ellington quote: there are only two kinds of music, good and bad. I think the challenge, then, is to create a set of music that all works together, even though on this record, you might be going from George Gershwin and Paul McCartney to Leonard Bernstein and Judee Sill.
UKJN: That’s pretty eclectic. But your organ records are, too.
LG: Yeah. It’s all over the place, but that’s all very, very much a part of who I am. One of my natural inclinations is to just try stuff that I love, whether it be a pop tune or from the jazz repertoire or this or that. So, I don’t really stress about the fact that it’s all over the place. I’m trying to sort of be myself through it all.
And it is true that I wouldn’t play these tunes, necessarily, with another set of musicians.
UKJN: Say more about that.
LG: [My 2014 album] Music From the Front Room [with bassist David Piltch and drummer Jay Bellerose] was another situation where we weren’t really looking to make a record. We just decided to throw up microphones at Jay’s house, and over months of late nights, we found that we had some material. But those are really different kinds of players who have their own unique strengths.
Jay wouldn’t consider himself a jazz drummer as such. But he’s got great ears and a great feel. That record was more about feel and soulfulness. And I was playing an upright piano, which totally influenced how I played, because the upright can only do certain things; it was better on slow material. So, that also influenced the direction of what we decided to play.
Duke Ellington used to write for individuals in his band more than anything else. I think that’s why his band sounded like it did, because he had [alto saxophonist] Johnny Hodges or [baritone saxophonist and clarinetist] Harry Carney or [tenor saxophonist] Paul Gonsalves in mind when he wrote a certain part.
I think that’s a great lesson, to think about the strengths and unique personalities of your players, and gear the material around it.
UKJN: I love your take on ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker’. Judee Sill is one of my all-time favourite singer/songwriters.
LG: Her music definitely spoke to me the first time my friend [and longtime collaborator, guitarist] Anthony Wilson played her for me. I’ve not only been playing ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker’; I just recorded a version of ‘The Kiss’ [from her second and final album, 1973’s Heart Food] with a great singer named Madison Cunningham. The harmonies, gospel influences, and perfected sorts of arrangements she had on both guitar and piano really spoke to me.
UKJN: And, of course, there’s the Beatles’ ‘I Will’.
LG: I’ve been loving that song for many years — the diatonic simplicity of it.
Whether I’m thinking about it or not, I’m trying to approach every disparate tune with my personality. I hate trying to analyse myself, but I guess that usually means bringing out some of the dissonance that might be in the song, or carefully reharmonising things. I don’t like to reharmonise to an extent that you might as well have written an original composition. I like to find the purity of a song.
That being said, I also like a song that lends itself to some interpretation. Like, ‘I Will’ is all written on the major scale; it’s a very childlike kind of song. That allows it to open up; there’s a lot that one can do.
UKJN: In press materials, you talk about the phenomenal recording setup at Sam First – a venue I’d never heard of.
LG: It’s only one of a handful of real listening[-friendly] jazz spots in LA. There’s going to be a couple more. Thank goodness the Blue Whale is going to reopen – not there, but in a different neighbourhood.
Sam First is really important because it’s run by a great music lover [Paul Solomon, who established the venue in 2017], and is, I imagine, a labor of love to a large extent. They have a good piano, and it’s booked by a great bass player and great guy, Dave Robaire. I think I was one of the first [bookings] the first week that it opened.
So, I have a history there, and it sounds good, and it’s intimate. Now, they have this label, so that adds a whole other incentive to try to get something going there. They’re really trying to do well by local artists. I think I’ll be bringing my organ trio in there for the second time later this year. I’m psyched to hear which other records come out of there.
UKJN: Can you talk about the role of humour in navigating a world spinning out of control, as well as the indignities the music industry throws at all of us?
LG: I never really thought that anybody other than my friends would know more about my personality, but that’s what the internet is going to do. I definitely embraced that early on with Myspace; that’s when I first introduced Hans Groiner to the world.
Sometimes I think that if somebody like Christopher Guest called me and said, “Drop what you’re doing. I need you to write music for my next film” or something, I would do it in a second. I love that brand of comedy, and it’s always been a big part of my world.
I think humour is a very useful defence. Particularly in this current world that’s giving us so much unrest and uncertainty, it’s really important to have a sense of humour. I found that out for real in the midst of deep lockdown days, when I did this thing that made it look like I was accompanying a terrible singer at the CPAC convention.
I never even really knew what it felt like for something to go viral; when the comments on your page are from [complete strangers], that’s kind of an interesting feeling. And it was a very connective feeling, because so many people during that dark time said, “Wow, I really needed to laugh.”
I’m still afraid of creating the wrong kind of imbalance with my serious music work and anything humourous that I decide to do. I don’t want to detract from my art, but I take it on as another sort of creative challenge.
If I can actually do something that makes people laugh, that’s another creative outlet for me. My Instagram is a creative outlet to try things that are both humorous or musically educational, or the two combined, which I don’t see a lot of people doing. So, I figure there’s a little bit of an opportunity there.
I think I’ve become less embarrassed about hearing the sound of my own voice or seeing myself on video. So, I have to get over that in order to be OK with that part of my personality. But really, I can’t help myself these days – particularly when I’m on the road and I’m bored and travelling from one city to another, and I’m too lazy to read a book or something.
I’m probably always going to make attempts to combine some humour with music. My version of trying out material live is the things that I say between songs at a gig. Live, I’ve taken Hans Groiner out a few times, which is probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done. But it’s all in the service of creativity.
